COVID Forever: Media Trying To Stoke Fear Over Latest Breakout In Europe

By William Teach March 18, 2022 – 6:45 am

They just can’t let go of the Fear Porn, eh?

Is Europe’s new COVID surge coming to America next?

While many Americans have decided the pandemic is “over” as it pertains to their own lives — a full 37 percent, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll — those who’ve been paying close attention to the latest COVID-19 developments overseas are now asking themselves two troublesome questions.

What the heck is happening in Europe? And is it about to happen in the U.S. too?

Over the last two weeks, COVID cases have shot up more than 25% across the European Union. In several European countries, the curve is even steeper: The United Kingdom (120%), Finland (88%) Switzerland (83%), Belgium (62%), Austria (59%), Germany (53%), Italy (49%), the Netherlands (45%) and France (27%). Hospitalizations are starting to rise as well.

And it’s not just this new trajectory that’s alarming; it’s the fact that it’s coming so quickly on the heels of Europe’s previous wave of infection — an Omicron surge that was even larger, and peaked even later, than the one in the United States. (snip)

So does this mean the United States is about to experience yet another huge surge at precisely the moment when our last modest safety measures — namely, indoor mask requirements in public places and schools — have been lifted?

The answer is … complicated.

Because masks totally stopped the rise of Delta and Omicron…..oh, wait

The issue, then, is probably less about whether U.S. COVID cases will rise in the coming weeks and more about how much. The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron — which is almost certainly aggravating the situation in Europe due to the fact that it’s at least 30 percent more transmissible than its sister lineage — is now gaining steam in the U.S. as well, accounting for 30% of new cases. U.S. wastewater surveillance also shows sharp increases in coronavirus RNA levels in sewage at 53 of the 419 sites where it was conducted between Feb. 24 and March 10.

That could be a leading indicator of a big new wave, but it’s not a guarantee. As Topol noted, the Alpha variant — which was 50 percent more transmissible than the original version of the virus — decimated the U.K. last winter, prompting fears of a spring surge in the United States. Yet while the proportion of U.S. Alpha cases kept going up, the total number of COVID cases kept going down. Ultimately, Michigan was the only state where Alpha really caught fire. The rest of the country was largely spared.

After seeing so much fearmongering over the past 2 years, it’s hard to determine if this is simply proper information meant to make sure people have what they need, or, stoking fear to increase government control over people’s lives (and make a profit off of it). The news outlets in the UK aren’t too concerned with it, thinking that the surge will end before the end of March. Even the far left BBC barely mentions the surge, same with the UK Guardian.

And

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Oops: California Climate (scam) Group Gives State A “D”

By William Teach March 17, 2022 – 3:00 pm

All that climavirtue signaling, all the taxes, fees, and mandates, and this is what you get (besides skyrocketing energy prices, cost of living)

Environmental group gives California a poor grade on climate change

The group’s recent report gave California’s political leaders their first “D” letter grade for 2021 over what it called “inaction” in addressing the climate crisis last year.

The group said the state failed to pass significant climate legislation in the past three years and is not on track to meet the state’s own stated climate goals.

A statement from CEO Mary Creasman, singled out “climate delayers” in the State Senate, specifically 18 Democrats, who received failing grades on the group’s legislative scorecard along with all of the Republican senators. Many Republicans received scores of less than 50.

Creasman complained that the legislators, “talk about climate change but don’t back up those words with action.”

The group, since there seems to be a bit missing, is Envirovoters, who should all be asked if they’ve traded their fossil fueled vehicles for EVs and stopped taking fossil fueled flights. If they’ve moved into tiny homes, hand wash and line dry their clothes, given up meat, and so forth. Which leads to

The runaway cost of virtue-signalling

(Batya Ungar-Sargon discusses many things, particularly the gaslighting from Joe and his Dem Comrades on gas, before getting to)

Take the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have connected the Alberta tar sands in Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but was blocked by Biden on his first day in office. On Friday, the president pooh-poohed the idea that his cancellation of the pipeline has impacted the price of fuel. ‘The Keystone Pipeline was two years away’, he said. ‘It had been two per cent finished. Give me a break.’ It’s a facetious argument, though. In shutting down the pipeline project, Biden sent a message to the oil industry – that its investments were not secure. This then translated into a market reality.

With a commodities market intentions will be read, and can positively, or negatively, affect those commodities, like oil.

It’s not just the pipeline, either. The fracking industry, which progressive environmental torchbearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation to ban, also offers jobs that provide significant upward mobility for those employed in it. The fracking boom has massively reduced income inequality in places like North Dakota, while a national ban on fracking would cost upward of 14million jobs that provide security and a middle-class lifestyle to millions of Americans.

The elites do not care

If you want to see how environmental policy furthers inequality, look no further than California, which is the state most committed to decarbonising its energy supply. It is now the most energy efficient state – as well as the state with the highest poverty rate in America. Twenty per cent of Californians live in poverty, and a growing number of academics have been tying that poverty to the cost of living – including to the cost of energy. Since 2011 the cost of electricity in California has increased five times as fast as the rest of the US.

Rising electricity prices in California have disproportionately impacted low-income families. In practice, this means that black and Latino households are spending 20 to 40 per cent more of their household incomes on energy than white households, the esteemed environmental lawyer Jennifer Hernandez found in a 2021 paper titled ‘Green Jim Crow’. In 2020, nearly four million California households – or 30 per cent of Californians – faced energy poverty. Meanwhile, more than two million households were forced to spend between 10 and 27 per cent of their total income on home energy.

Can you imagine how bad this would be if California got a grade higher than “D”?

‘Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices. But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices’, President Biden tweeted last week. Electric cars have become the ‘Let them eat cake’ of 2022.

It’s easy for the rich to buy an EV, because they want to. For most Americans, they can’t make that choice. Did the Envirovoters make a choice to get one themselves?

Read: Oops: California Climate (scam) Group Gives State A “D” »

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If All You See…

By William Teach March 17, 2022 – 1:00 pm

…are trees dying from too much carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Dissecting Leftism, with a post on whether or not you should vaccinate your young child.

Read: If All You See… »

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Biden To Waive Sanctions So Russia Can Build Iran A Nuclear Power Station

By William Teach March 17, 2022 – 10:30 am

Why is Biden, along with his people, so desperate to get a deal with Iran? Does he think this will make him look good? It didn’t really help Obama. Does he think it will help his poll numbers? Does he think the American people are clamoring to do a deal with Iran? Most Americans understand that Iran will backslide on the deal the minute the ink dries. And, he’s helping Russia

From the link

Russia’s top state-controlled energy company is set to cash in on a $10 billion contract to build out one of Iran’s most contested nuclear sites as part of concessions granted in the soon-to-be-announced nuclear agreement that will guarantee sanctions on both countries are lifted.

Russian and Iranian documents translated for the Washington Free Beacon show that Rosatom, Russia’s leading energy company, has a $10 billion contract with Iran’s atomic energy organization to expand Tehran’s Bushehr nuclear plant. Russia and the Biden administration confirmed on Tuesday that the new nuclear agreement includes carveouts that will waive sanctions on both countries so that Russia can make good on this contract.

“We, of course, would not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects that are part of resuming full implementation of the JCPOA,” State Department spokesman Ned Price confirmed on Tuesday, referring to the original 2015 nuclear accord. Russia’s foreign ministry made a similar statement on Tuesday, saying that “additions were made to the text of the future agreement on JCPOA restoration to ensure that all the JCPOA-related projects, [especially] with Russian participation, as well as Bushehr [nuclear power plant], are protected from negative impact of anti-Russian restrictions” by the United States and European Union.

The removal of these sanctions will provide Moscow’s Rosatom company with a critical source of revenue as American and European sanctions crush Russia’s economy in response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The concessions to Moscow have generated frustration on Capitol Hill, with top Republican leaders accusing the Biden administration of weakening penalties on Russia to secure an agreement with Iran. Moscow has served as the United States’ top interlocutor in talks, even as the country’s war machine rolls across Ukraine. The Free Beacon first reported on Tuesday that a policy document circulating among lawmakers exposes how the new nuclear agreement will create a “sanctions evasion hub” for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Good job, Brandon! You’re helping Russia and Iran. In the article this is called “throwing a life line” to Russia, as most 1st World nations have isolated Russia economically. Why is this deal with Iran so damned important? How does this help the United States? Does he think Iran will suddenly stop chanting “Death To America”?

If it was Trump pushing the deal we’d be hearing about him being a Russian asset, right? Biden is literally trying to enrich Russia while demonizing them for invading Ukraine. He’s actively working to make our enemies stronger.

https://twitter.com/JamesCu13191408/status/1504226280580939776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504226280580939776%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt-3136%2F2022%2F03%2F16%2Freport-biden-administration-to-waive-sanctions-so-russian-energy-firm-can-build-iranian-nuclear-plant%2F

Oops? What’s Joe’s stake in this?

Oh, and, apparently, Joe wants to remove sanctions in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Read: Biden To Waive Sanctions So Russia Can Build Iran A Nuclear Power Station »

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New And Hot: Electric Vehicle Owners Need To Pay Their Fair Share

By William Teach March 17, 2022 – 7:15 am

You knew this was coming, right? Back when Obama was president, he and the other Warmists were pushing hybrids hard, but, because they used a lot less gas, there was a big loss of gas tax revenue, so, they were pimping all sorts of fees and schemes to nail those hybrid owners who were saving money at the pump. Now we get the same thing for EVs

Electric vehicle owners have to contribute their fair share for roads

Electric vehicleMinnesota has seen yearly increases in electric vehicle sales, with the main selling point of these cars being that owners don’t have to pay for gas, they don’t have to pay added fees for charging and gas taxes will never affect them. That has led to a decrease in transportation revenue as the use of gas vehicles drops. We know that electric vehicles are the trend of the future, and they are already benefitting from our roads and bridges — electric vehicle owners simply need to pay their fair share for doing so.

Last year I introduced a bill that taxes charging stations, treating these charges as “electric fuel.” This would allow us to collect fuel tax dollars from electric vehicles just like we do our gas counterparts. Gas taxes are currently collected at the refinery, not the pumps. It only makes sense that we take this model and apply it to electric vehicle charging as well. This is an issue that will have long-term effects on our infrastructure funding as we head into the future. We need to start thinking about this now, before we see a rapid increase of charging station installations throughout the state.

That being said, we don’t want to double-tax folks either. With this plan, we will also repeal the $75 surcharge on electric vehicles. We also plan to exempt transit providers, medical assistance providers and ambulances.

Save money by not using gas! Give government money after they forced you into an EV that you can’t afford! This is by state senator Jeff Howe, R-Rockwell.

In fairness, I have no idea what he thinks on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. He doesn’t seem to have a webpage other than Facebook, which tells us nothing. He has voted against many climate scam bills in the Minnesota legislature. Maybe he’s trying to make a subtle point about the EV push? That said, sooner or later the Warmists themselves will start pushing the same thing, as the money for roads and bridges and such dries up as gasoline tax dries up, and someone has to piny up, right? This is inevitable, especially since all that tax money leads to lots of pork projects, graft, hooking frinds and family up, right?

Read: New And Hot: Electric Vehicle Owners Need To Pay Their Fair Share »

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Good News: Media Exposes Secret CIA Program In Ukraine (which Biden scuttled)

By William Teach March 17, 2022 – 7:00 am

This is a Yahoo News exclusive, which, interestingly, no one else is really picking up. Could it be due to a responsibility to not broadcast secret material, or something else?

Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion

Ukrainian snipers had a problem: Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were trying to blind them.

As the Ukrainians were looking through their scopes in order to find their targets, the Russians had begun pinpointing their location using the glare of the glass, and were shooting high-energy lasers into them, damaging the snipers’ eyesight.

The two sides were squaring off in close proximity. In early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Shortly thereafter, pro-Russia insurgents in the eastern Donbas region began a grinding secessionist war against Kyiv.

Russian troops soon entered the fray. So, quietly, did the CIA.

As the battle lines hardened in Donbas, a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts there, according to former U.S. officials.

CIA paramilitaries soon concluded that, in Russia and its proxies, the agency was facing an adversary whose capabilities far outmatched the Islamist groups that CIA had been battling in the post-9/11 wars. “We learned a lot real quick,” says a former senior intelligence official — including about the Russians’ laser-blinding techniques. “That s*** wouldn’t happen with the Taliban.”

The Ukrainian military has claimed to have killed three Russian generals, including at least one reportedly eliminated by sniper fire. (Yahoo News could not independently verify whether the Russian commanders were killed by CIA-trained troops.)

The CIA was spending a lot of time in Ukraine training snipers, working to overcome the obstacles presented by well trained Russian troops with high tech capabilities, and more

As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.

Sounds like a good operation. It’s certainly helped Ukraine fight back, eh? Perhaps Yahoo News should have scuttled essentially telling the Russians all about the secret program, which they say was verified by many, many unnamed sources. The piece spends many, many paragraphs describing all the training the CIA provided, well worth the read. Good of Obama to greenlight the program (if he even knew about it, since he seemed to find out most things from the media). The job was to train and advise, not engage Russians, to make the Ukrainians more effective. The Trump admin was concerned about the potential for direct confrontation, but, still kept it. But

The Ukraine-based CIA program operated for years, according to former officials. But as the threat of a large-scale Russian invasion became increasingly acute last month, the Biden administration, still feeling the sting of the Afghanistan withdrawal, pulled all CIA personnel out of the country, including war-zone-hardened agency paramilitaries, according to a former intelligence official in close touch with colleagues in U.S. government.

The administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being on the frontline,” says the former official.

Run away, run away! I wonder of Biden even knew about it till last month?

Read: Good News: Media Exposes Secret CIA Program In Ukraine (which Biden scuttled) »

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Secretary Granholm Pimps “Clean Energy” Because Of War In Ukraine

By William Teach March 16, 2022 – 3:00 pm

Democrats know how to take advantage of a crisis, and the climate cultists even more so. It matters not a whit if it hurts citizens, because this is Progressivism, ie, nice Fascism. They’re doing this For Your Own Good, whether you want it or not

Well, that’s interesting, and, might have some power if these people ever practiced what they preached

(Energy.gov) On Friday, March 11, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm traveled to Mid Michigan to highlight the importance of achieving energy independence through clean energy, strong and secure domestic supply chains, and American manufacturing. The Secretary was joined by U.S. Representative Dan Kildee (MI-05), Chief Deputy Whip of the House Democratic Caucus, to tour Xalt Energy and Hemlock Semiconductor Operations. The visit highlighted the Biden Administration’s ongoing efforts to lower energy costs for American communities, combat the climate crisis, and generate clean energy jobs through an equitable clean energy transition.

And how did she travel there? Surely she took the train, right? It’s a mere 21 hours or so to get there, then she could bike or take the bus to get around, right?

Later, Granholm told reporters solar is the cheapest form of energy. As an example, she compared electricity costs to the current high gas prices to fill up her car.

“It would cost me, if I had to fill it up at a gas station, it would cost me 65 bucks. Maybe,” said Granholm, “If I plug it into my garage, it would cost about $12 to go the same distance.”

Does Granholm actually drive an EV? She supposedly leases Chevy Volts. But, they are not an EV. They are a plugin hybrid. Which were discontinued in 2019. So, what now? Who wants to bet she traveled around Michigan in a fossil fueled SUV? Let’s also not forget that she has vast investments in an EV battery company.

Read: Secretary Granholm Pimps “Clean Energy” Because Of War In Ukraine »

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If All You See…

By William Teach March 16, 2022 – 1:00 pm

…are tropical plants which will soon grow in Greenland from climate crisis, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Climate Change Dispatch, with a post on a study showing that the “CO2 drives warming” theory is obsolete and inaccurate.

Read: If All You See… »

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FSB Whistleblower Says China Had Plans To Invade Taiwan

By William Teach March 16, 2022 – 10:30 am

Is this real? Is it something? Could it still be on, since Joe is rather ineffective?

Ukraine war upended China’s plan to invade Taiwan, alleged FSB whistleblower says

China Votes BidenRussia’s invasion of Ukraine upended Chinese President Xi Jinping’s timetable to invade Taiwan, according to documents purportedly written by a Russian intelligence analyst in one of Moscow’s security agencies.

“Xi Jinping was at least considering taking over Taiwan in the fall – he needs his own little victory to get re-elected for a third term – there the struggle within the elite is colossal,” an agent in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, allegedly wrote on March 9. China will hold its 20th Communist Party Congress this fall, and Xi has said it will be a “major event.” Analysts have predicted that Xi will either be re-elected as the general secretary of the Communist Party or be elected to the chairmanship of the party, a position that has not existed since 1982.

“Now, after the Ukrainian events, this window of opportunity has been closed to him, which gives the United States the opportunity to both blackmail Xi and negotiate with its competitors on favorable terms,” the FSB agent added. “It was in this case that we launched a trap mechanism for China with our actions.”

The agent added that the FSB is “seriously considering” claiming that “the battle on Ukrainian territory is a US war against China, in which the Americans simply set us up and used us.”

“The global clash between the US and China was inevitable,” the agent wrote. “After the war with Ukraine (although I may avoid using the term ‘operation’ here), the cost of resources in the world, especially energy ones, has gone up. The main victim of such actions becomes China, to which (I can confirm) were given guarantees that everything will end quickly. Therefore, China behaved tolerant in the past. But that was before that.”

Many in the intelligence community are saying this is real

Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the Gulagu.net human rights group, published the report on his Facebook page last week. He claimed that the same FSB agent wrote this document and the March 5 report that claimed a Russian victory in Ukraine had become a near impossibility.

Christo Grozev, who works for the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat, tweeted that he showed the March 5 letter to two FSB contacts, one current and one former employee. They had no doubt that the author was a colleague, he said.

The question now, if this is real, is “does China scuttle their plans, or go ahead with them?” Because Joe doesn’t seem to have the backbone or ability to stop China from invading Taiwan, just like with Ukraine. And, does the U.S. want to go to war for Taiwan?

Read: FSB Whistleblower Says China Had Plans To Invade Taiwan »

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White House Still Scaremongering On Wuhan Flu As Spending Bill Cuts COVID Money

By William Teach March 16, 2022 – 9:22 am

I’m not sure why Brandon and his people, along with Congressional Democrats, want to keep the doom and gloom from COVID going: more Americans died under Biden’s watch than Trump’s, and infection rates skyrocketed twice, one way higher than while Trump was president, despite knowing way more than in 2020, forcing masking, and all the vaccines, and way more infections than during 2020. You’d think would want to forget about that. But, he doesn’t

White House warns of ‘severe consequences’ as Congress cuts COVID aid

Biden Brain SlugAfter a prolonged back and forth, Congress passed a $1.5 trillion government spending bill last week but dropped from the final package $22.5 billion in pandemic relief that Democrats wanted to include.

On Tuesday, the same day as President Joe Biden signed the 2,741-page bill into law, his aides warned that the omission could “have severe consequences as we will not be equipped to deal with a future surge.”

The U.S. could soon run out of funding for COVID responses such as booster shots, treatments efforts, and tests if the legislation remains stuck in Congress, officials warned. The warning — which came in the form of a letter to Congressional leadership and a press release — focused on the possibility of future variants as current caseloads have dropped since the record-breaking omicron-fueled numbers from over the winter.

Vaccine “shortages will be even more acute if we need a variant-specific booster vaccine,” the White House noted. Moreover, Biden aides warned, a lack of funding could thwart efforts to develop a “pan-COVID vaccine” to stop a range of variants.

This is all being blamed on Republicans, of course, because that’s politics, forgetting that Democrats can pass just about anything they want in the House, as they have the majority, and same in Senate, as long as every Democrat votes “yes”.

The White House announced other consequences Tuesday including the canceling of plans to purchase additional monoclonal antibody treatments and the expiration of a fund that reimburses doctors caring for uninsured individuals.

That’s just spiteful, because he didn’t get his way. There’s certainly plenty of funds left from all the previous bills.

Republicans have been largely unified in opposing the funds. Sen. Richard Shelby (R- AL) sounded skeptical to Punchbowl News on Monday, saying: “If there’s a need for it and they can show there’s a need, you’d get — I think — overwhelming votes up here. But there’s a doubt there that they need this money, with a lot of us.”

Do we need it? How about getting rid of a lot of the wasteful spending in the bill. Most of the ‘climate change’ garbage could have been cut. If we need it, Congress does know they are able to pass a stand alone bill, right? Without all sorts of stupid stuff and pork?

Read: White House Still Scaremongering On Wuhan Flu As Spending Bill Cuts COVID Money »

Posted in Bat Soup Virus, Democrats, Joe Biden | 38 Comments | Trackback URL
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